Gore Metal vs Girl Band Pop

Last week I blogged about the clash between Feminist Extreme Metal and Glam Rock on BBC3's Singing With The Enemy.  This week's show featured an even more impossible sounding clash between two uterrly different groups with the aim of writing, recording and performing a song together in a week. Amputated are Gore Metal of the sickest, most misogynist kind, whereas Fallen Angelz are girl band/r 'n' b of the girliest kind.

Predictably the boys played up to the camera mercilessly in the first few days. Taunting the girls by playing porn DVDs, leaving knives on their door and taking relish in their horror at their lyrical themes. I have to say that Amputated turned me off as well at first. Although their music is grind-tastically good, their attitudes were repulsive, particularly those of Mark the singer. Most  Gore Bands (such as their heroes Cannibal Corpse) tend to  emphasise that their lyrics are just fantasies or  treat them as jokes, Mark in particular was keen to emphasise his  real-life hatred of women. That said, I did enjoy the horror the girls expressed when they were first exposed to Amputated's music and when they were taken to see Vader live. Let's face it, there's a perverse pleasure in loving music that scares people.

Once again, in true reality show fashioin, things progressed over the week. The girls worked hard to build relationships with the boys as individuals. They realised that much of the sick machismo fell away when the boys were alone and that they were in the main reasonable blokes. The boys also worked hard to tone down their sound just enough to make collaboration possible. The hold out was singer Mark who, it later transpired, was scared of sounding ridiculous if he toned his vocal style down.

What is absolutely remarkable is the track they came up with 'Slave' is genuinely brilliant.  It's still Death Metal, albeit with sickest Gore Metal edges smoothed off. Fallen Anglez's harmonies merge really well with the riffs, including - extraordinarily - with the blast beat section.

Of course this is further proof, if that were needed, of the ability of Metal to combine with disparate genres. We always new that with Folk Metal, we learned it in the late 90s with Black Metal, and now we know it with r'n'b.

The track can be heard here.